this article does a better job than I could of putting my thoughts in to
perspective as to why I haven’t jumped on the Sanders bandwagon and why I’m
having trouble buying in to his campaign. To start I must that I am a proud
liberal Democrat (note the differentiation from progressive). My goal is not a
political revolution but is to elect Democrats and further the Democratic Party
locally and nationally by making sure that Republicans are voted out of office.
While the Obama Administration could have done some things better I am not
ashamed of its performance. I have said in earlier posts that I believe the
problem has been the Tea Party in Congress and in state and local government. I
believe that at the time the banks and auto industry needed to be bailed out to
protect America as a whole and the economy. Yes the bail out might not have
gone far enough for the average consumer but the consequences of not having it
might have been much worse. I want a candidate to show partisanship which is
why I supported O’Malley until he dropped out of the race. Perhaps I’m
promoting the status quo but I just can’t get excited about the issues that the
Sanders campaign presents and the solutions that it offers.
Chuck
From: Frank Ventura
Sent: Saturday, March 26, 2016 1:12 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Could President Sanders defeat a Republican congress
From:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/01/25/could-president-sanders-defeat-republican-congress/SflnJZh7gwLqHtNEaNOF0N/story.html
Could President Sanders defeat a Republican Congress? - The Boston Globe
Page 2 of 6
Cohen writes:
Surely, because he serves in the Senate, Sanders knows that a public option in
Obamacare didn’t fail because Obama didn’t advocate for it; it failed because
Democrats in Congress refused to go along with it.
Bernie Sanders listened to a question at a town hall apoearance in Iowa Falls,
Iowa, on Monday.
Mark Kauzlarich/REUTERS
Bernie Sanders listened to a question at a town hall apoearance in Iowa Falls,
Iowa, on Monday.
By Michael A. Cohen January 26, 2016
Bernie Sanders on the campaign trail is quite good. His rap on income
inequality and the distorting effects of big money in American politics is
persuasive and effective. But as I listened to him speak in Nashua last week, I
couldn’t help notice there was something missing from his stump speech:
Republicans.
It’s a bit of an odd omission, seeing as Sanders is running for the Democratic
nomination for president. But it also speaks to one of the fundamental problems
with Sanders’ campaign and his theory of political change.
Now to be sure, it’s not as if Sanders fails to criticize Republicans (he
does); it’s that his focus lies elsewhere.
He says, “What we’ve got to do is create a political revolution which
revitalizes American democracy; which brings millions of young people and
working people into the political process.” In a recent speech on Wall Street,
he listed the iniquities of the One Percent, but never mentioned the GOP.
This language is at pace with a campaign message that views money, not
Republicans, as the true impediment to transformative political change. But
just a cursory review of the past seven years of American politics suggests
that Sanders is wrong.
First and foremost, to say that nothing real will happen until we have a
political revolution is refuted by history. Since President Obama took office,
Congress passed a health care law that expanded access to 20 million people,
reformed the student loan program, made massive investments in clean energy and
infrastructure, and strengthened financial regulation. What allowed this to
happen wasn’t a political revolution. It also wasn’t even the election of a
Democratic president. The simple fact is that much of this happened because
Democrats, for a brief period, had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate
and control of the House.
Democrats have enjoyed far less success now that Republicans control Congress.
GOP opposition on Capitol Hill is not simply a result of campaign donations
from Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers, and Wall Street — three of Sanders’
key bogeymen. It wasn’t these folks that had the most to lose from health care
reform; and indeed many on Wall Street and in the business community disagreed
with Republican opposition to immigration and watched in horror as Republicans
in Congress played chicken with the debt limit. The driver for these efforts is
politics and the ideological preferences of Republican politicians and voters.
But the second problem here is that Sanders, though running as a Democrat, is
diminishing, even disrespecting, the accomplishments of Democrats. Implicit in
Sanders’ call for single-payer health care is that Obamacare is simply
inadequate to the challenge of ensuring greater access to care and cutting
costs. Implicit in Sanders’ call for greater financial regulation is that
Dodd-Frank is inadequate reform. Implicit in Sanders’ call for free higher
education is that Democratic efforts to improve the student loan program and
ensure free tuition for community college is that these measures are
insufficient.
Now of course Sanders would likely suggest that one needs a political
revolution to ensure the kind of changes that go beyond these half-measures.
But if one believes that, why is Sanders running for president?
Surely, because he serves in the Senate, Sanders knows that a public option in
Obamacare didn’t fail because Obama didn’t advocate for it; it failed because
Democrats in Congress refused to go along with it.
If it is Congress — particularly Republicans — that has blocked reform,
shouldn’t Sanders’ focus be on electing more liberal Democrats to Congress?
I asked his campaign how much time he’s spent over the years helping Democrats
get elected to Congress. I didn’t get a response. But it bears noting that
Sanders isn’t even a Democrat, and from my admittedly crude Google searches I
couldn’t find much evidence that he’s actively campaigned on behalf of
Democratic House and Senate candidates.
That stands in contrast to his opponents, Martin O’Malley and Hillary Clinton.
O’Malley criticized Sanders during the last Democratic debate for not
campaigning on behalf of Democratic candidates in South Carolina. For her part,
Clinton campaigned in 20 states at the tail end of the 2014 midterm election.
In fact, while Clinton helped to raise $18 million for Democrats in 2015,
Sanders didn’t raise a dime for the DNC — and she’s identified helping
down-ballot Democrats and rebuilding local Democratic parties as top priorities.
As Sanders, who has been in Washington for decades surely must know, Congress
today is a dysfunctional mess, one in which Republicans block pretty much every
single reform effort proposed by Democrats. Why would President Sanders be
successful in overcoming Republican obstructionism? If he believes the key to
creating a political revolution would come through overturning Citizen United
or ending the influence of super PACS or moving toward public funding of
elections or ending redistricting, how exactly would he accomplish that?
The point of course is that he wouldn’t, not without a solid majority of
Democrats in Congress and even then much of his agenda would be open to
negotiation.
Now, in fairness, lots of presidential candidates talk about legislation on the
campaign trail that has no chance of becoming law. Clinton is just as guilty of
this, but she’s not the one talking about a political revolution or being
indifferent about electing more Democrats to Congress.
If anything, political change in America rarely begins with the actions of
presidents — it usually ends with them, as political leaders, pushed by
activists and social movements, are often the last group to jump on a political
bandwagon. This has been true from enacting laws to protect workers and the
civil rights movement to more modern fights in support of same-sex marriage.
Sanders’ focus on the presidency as a spark for massive political change is a
particular affliction that affects the Democratic Party, where more emphasis is
placed on electing a president than on the hard work of electing Democrats not
just to Congress but at the state and local level, too.
In a sense, this is what is so troubling about what Sanders is doing. It’s not
just that he is presenting his supporters with a simplistic understanding of
how political change happens, he is merely setting them up for crushing
disappointment. If, by some outside chance, Sanders became president, his
agenda would be dead on arrival. We’d see four more years of gridlock and four
more years of dysfunction. If Sanders really wanted to push his agenda, he
would have spent the last few years electing like-minded Democrats to Congress.
But I suppose that’s less fun than running for president.
Michael A. Cohen’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Foll0w him on Twitter
@speechboy71.
